Moderators: Kent, luketeaford, Joe.
Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music wrote:Electronica does not exist. Not as a genre or a description. It was coined by the North American music press to refer to the second wave of electronic music's explosion in the late 90s, and exists purely as a marketing buzzword, not any actual quantifiable branch of music (the first wave of electronic music, incidentally, they called 'techno', and, having driven the word into the ground beyond all sense of meaning, they couldn't keep using it if they wished to re-market the music). Daft Punk, Fatboy Slim, Prodigy's 'Fat of the Land', Chemical Brothers and other big-time stars of that period were all called "electronica" at one point or another, but the person who really popularized it in the public consciousness was Madonna and her shallow, William Orbit-produced piss-poor attempt at appropriating trance music as something she invented (Ray of Light). She used that word all the damn time in interviews. God I hate her. So yeah: There is no such thing as electronica. I want each and every one of you to stop calling it that, because it makes you sound like a god damn retard. If you want to talk about the music as a whole, simply call it what it is: "electronic music" (or EDM--Electronic Dance Music--for the club/rave stuff). This is a PSA from the Official Electronic Music Genre Standards and Classifications Consortium.
suboptimal wrote:... if it's music you want to make with your modular, STG should be in your system.
that album and Orbit's output thereafter were EXTREMELY disappointing to me because i like the Strange Cargo albums quite a bit.Morley wrote:I really can't stand the synths on Ray Of Light. Nasty.
suboptimal wrote:... if it's music you want to make with your modular, STG should be in your system.
i fear the answer that best helps as far as finding music you like/helping others who will like yours find it is that you use your modular to make both 'Electronic Music' and 'Electronica'. however, too many people will not search under such genres these days because they are so all encompassing.melodydad wrote:This is not at all meant to be a frivolous post but may come over as an 'old fart' type question, but what is it that we make with our modulars? 'Electronic Music' or 'Electronica'?
essex sound lab wrote:I find the term sufficiently vague -- and employed in so many ways different ways -- that it's become useless in any broader context.
any term that is sufficiently meaningfull enough to be usefull will inevitably be so over-used it will become useless. the good thing about this is it works just as well for micro markets as it does for mass & you just need to follow your ears & keep clicking till something you like pops upPhineasFreak wrote:otherwise the best tricks are following the mass market and looking to see what the artists you listen/liken your music to get classified as on itunes or beatport or amazon.
This is probably bothers people - just because any arbitrary term is real, is not to say that it represents anything accurate! Whenever music press decides to try to publicize what "the kids are into these days" the results are humorous and not to be taken seriously. Especially these days when, as you remarked, music and jargon are so plastic. People coin and misappropriate labels because a catch-all term satisfies a desire for catch-all categorization. Because the press themselves never seemed to know what electronica was, I disregarded the term.DGTom wrote:in a mediatized culture once a word / term is used in public it becomes real, even if its coined for the most cynical of reasons (like pitching a doco to PBS or curating a compilation CD for Virgin)
